


That Was a Close One

by PositivelyVexed



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, wound fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-15 05:41:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13606740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: After surviving the ambush at Minnie's, Mannix helps Warren hunt down a bounty on some former acquaintances from South Carolina. Complications arise.





	That Was a Close One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starlatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlatine/gifts).



Warren came around, alive and intact, in a shitty twin-size bed in Red Rock, and spent the next three months with that and little else to be thankful for. The first unpleasant shock he got, after waking up alive, was rolling over and finding himself sharing a room with Mannix, their beds so close they could have reached out and held hands, if that was the sort of thing they’d do.

“Major, that was a _hell_ of a close one,” Mannix had said by way of greeting, and hadn’t stopped running his mouth since. Apparently he seemed to think they were friends now.

In dribs and drabs, it came out that Mannix had been telling the truth about being the sheriff, but there was a hitch there. Not so very long after their asses were dragged into town, when they were still out of it and no one seemed sure which side of the grave they'd end up on, the town of Red Rock decided it had already waited long enough on the new sheriff, and if they’d wanted a sheriff shot through with holes they might as well have stuck with the last one, and swore in some dipshit nephew of the mayor instead. Warren had met the boy before, and privately thought even Mannix would have made a better sheriff, but he just held his tongue on that score while Mannix spent the next month bitching about the sheer unfairness of it all.

Even with that sob story under his belt, Warren just laughed when Mannix started dropping hints about partnering up. He wasn’t running any kind of charity for down-on-their-luck racist shitkickers, and this one was no exception, even if he had developed some puppy-eagerness to please him that almost passed for endearing when Warren was in just the right mood. He calculated that there had to be a low ceiling on the number of situations in this world so dire that they’d be improved by Mannix’s presence in them, and he didn’t plan to get himself into another one any time soon.

Then something happened, one day near the end of their convalescence. It'd started with Warren shoving his stack of warrants at Mannix to read because it was easier than listening to him bitch one more time about being bored, and Mannix settling in to read cheerfully. Not that he couldn't see what Mannix was doing, pausing to comment how easily the two of them could take this or that mean bastard together. Let him try.

Mannix turned a page and straightened up in bed. “Well I’ll be double-dog damned, the Harrow brothers. Major, I _know_ them.”

“The stagecoach stick-up gang? They don’t even have a picture to go with their handbill because they ain’t left a survivor yet. How you know them?”

Mannix waved that away. “I know them from South Carolina,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement. “Hell, I used to hunt squirrels with the youngest, Tom. Now, Tom don’t see to be on here. But all the rest of them are. Burt, Charlie and Bill, late of Dillon County. Shit, we grew up not three miles from each other. And, hoo boy, they’ve gotten into some shit since I last saw them, enough to get a twenty thousand dollar bounty on their heads. Some of these details are almost enough to put you to shame, major.”

Like that was going to sway him into partnering up any. He raised his eyebrows.

“The point _is_ , I know what they look like, major. I wasn't what you'd call close to any of them but Tom, and he ain't a part of it, but I could pick out their faces. Hell, I know what they sound like. And with every other bounty hunter working blind, I say that gives us a hell of an advantage over the competition.”

“Funny as it is to picture you selling out your old hillbilly brethren on my behalf, I don’t think I trust you that far.”

“After all we been through?”

“We had one night where our interests aligned, and you’ve annoyed me every night since. And no, as a rule, I don’t trust Southern crackers to help me kill other Southern crackers.”

Mannix frowned, like Warren maybe not trusting him with his whole heart and soul had never occurred to him till now. “Major, the key factor you’re forgetting is these Southern crackers got a bounty on their heads that could make our fortunes, but only if we work together. All sentiment aside, we’re both _pragmatic_ men, ain’t we?”

Warren supposed that was so. Twenty thousand dollars was hard to argue with. So was the unhappy reality that he did find himself trusting Mannix, against all rights and reason, even as he knew better. White men's pragmatism, being what it was, was nothing at all to rely on, their loyalty even less, and he probably deserved to die if he ever let himself forget that, but here he was anyway.

“I’m sick of talking to you,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

A week later, Warren got up early, got himself properly dressed for the first time in who knows how long, and packed his bags. When Mannix came around, he was sitting on the side of Mannix’s bed, gun across his lap. Mannix stirred and started up fast.

Warren got the gun up, finger on the trigger, barrel nestled nice and neat under Mannix’s chin.

“Major?”

“Let’s lay out some ground-rules if you're going to come along. This is a one-time thing. We ain’t partners, because that implies some kind of equal arrangement I don’t have time for. This is my operation, and we do things my way. You get two thousand dollars if you actually identify them, and I decide how we split the money afterward if you do anything more helpful. And you try to wear Sandy Smithers’ coat in my presence, I’ll set it on fire with you in it. That sound like something you can live with?”

Mannix looked at him, and grinned as big as a jack-o-lantern.

Three days later, they left town together.

The ground rules went pear-shaped almost from the start. Knowing what the Harrow brothers looked like might have helped them if anyone’d seen them, but after tracking them as far as Denver, their trail more or less went cold. They still had to eat, though, so when a horse-thief named Sutter Hicks practically fell into their laps, it wasn’t any choice at all. They killed him, and Mannix actually proved himself pretty damn useful in it, so Warren gave him a cut even though that hadn’t been part of the agreement. He supposed that was when he really started losing his way.

In the weeks that followed, they did a string of piecemeal three-and-four-hundred-dollar jobs. The worst part was, Warren didn’t hate it. The bounties went down belching blood nice and easy, and after Minnie’s it felt good to have that. Mannix took to taking orders like he was born for it, which tickled Warren. And he had some open-faced Southern boy knack for making inroads with the locals, shit Warren wouldn’t have stood a chance with. Good at killing, too, though that didn’t surprise him any, and it was hard to get too warm and toasty on that front, considering. 

Once, they found themselves washed up in a little nowhere burg on the border of Colorado and Wyoming that may have been a one-horse town, supposing the horse had keeled over and died some years back. They’d tracked a bushwhacker of some notoriety to his camp just outside of town, and he'd proved harder to take down than anyone in months. The fight had included him swinging a flaming torch at one point, and Warren'd had sustained a burn on his left hand defending himself. 

Shitty small town like this, Warren knew how it went. When the one rat-trap boarding house in town decided its sensibilities were too delicate for a black man’s presence, they were shit out of luck. So it went that they ended camping out in the woods while Mannix did the best he could for the burn, bitching all the while about the gall of the landlady, about how such degradations were against the spirit of the West and the hypocrisies of the North, and Warren was sorely tempted to beat him into the ground, one handed. Instead, he just let himself be tended to while his hand throbbed.

“Don’t you worry, major,” Mannix was saying with infinite confidence. “This is purely a flesh wound. I got a dozen myself just like it in the kitchen when I was younger. Always made a full recovery.”

He couldn’t look as Mannix fussed over his aching hand, not out of any squeamishness over the injury so much as a desire to not confront the life choices that had led him here, sitting in a tent freezing his ass getting tended to by Mannix. It was easier to look away.

“Anyhow, you have to appreciate the irony of the situation. You getting burned."  

“I must have been too damn busy appreciating the irony of you bitching about discriminatory boarding practices.”

Mannix didn’t even blink at that. “You’re a wounded man, and you fought for this frozen asscrack of the country. Seems to me the least they could do is show a little respect for the uniform.”

"Boy who was practically licking Sandy Smithers' balls wants to lecture folks on respect for the colored uniform."

“I just mean,” Mannix said, and stopped. “Anyway, seems to me we’re the best thing’s blown through this town in the last decade. And we took care of him out there for them. So why are we the ones freezing our asses off outside when it's cold enough to snow?”

Warren looked at his face, lit up in profile by the dying fire outside. Thought of the first time he had laid eyes on Chris Mannix, shivering in the snow. He hadn't been good looking then, and he wasn't now. But sometimes the play of the light or just the way he looked at Warren improved him. Made him look interesting, and not just unfortunate.

Mannix drew back the tent flap a bit, revealing snowflakes falling steadily. “I'll never get used to a place can get snow in September. I don't even know why you stick around here."

“It’s a snow flurry, not a blizzard. Besides, it’s not like I got too many positive associations with warmer climes.”

Mannix actually conceded the point, nodding like he'd never looked at it that way. "Suppose that's fair."

It gave Warren the opening to say something he'd been thinking about. “Not that I really give a shit, but why _didn’t_ you head back to South Carolina when you had the chance?”

“Didn’t have the money,” he said lazily. 

“No, Chris. That ain't so. See, I know the folks of Red Rock pitched in to buy you a train ticket home, and you didn't use it.”

Suddenly guarded, he gave a too-casual shrug. “I guess I had other reasons, then.”

“That’s what I can’t work out. Why a man who cries his eyes out over missing Dixie as much as you do didn’t go back when you had the chance."

Mannix looked like he could sense he’d walked into a trap but couldn’t fathom the nature of it. He kept his mouth shut.

"You running from something, Chris?”

“I ain’t.” And he widened his eyes loftily. “I mean, a man can be his own man out west, can't he?”

“I suppose he could. But you ain’t your own man out here, are you, Chris? As long as our arrangement holds, you’re mine.”

Mannix's expression darkened up nicely at that. “You’re the one that’s got all the answers. What do you think I’m running from, major?”

“Maybe nothing.” He folded his arms behind his head, like none of it was anything to him one way or another.  “Maybe nothing you done _yet_. Maybe certain inclinations meant you had to go, cause you sure couldn’t stay there without bringing shame on your family, and nice white boy like you'd never dream of doing that. Maybe you came out here to do what couldn’t be safely conducted at home.”

His face went pale as birchwood bark. Pale as the fresh-fallen snow. Eyes told him he'd hit on the truth.

Still he played it coy: “All kinds of folks head west, major.” He tilted his head, looked down. Warren’d gone and got half-hard, he'd enjoyed calling Mannix out on his bullshit so much, and Mannix was many things, but blind he wasn’t. He swallowed. “Yourself included.”

Warren shrugged. No point denying the obvious. “Yeah. Myself included.”

Mannix’s Adam's apple caught a glint of firelight as it bobbed.

Like a man in a trance, Mannix moved himself from the corner where he was shivering, and laid himself down tentatively next to Warren, the way a man might lay himself down next to a tiger. “Well, that’s no surprise, man with your _history_.”

Warren smiled in spite of himself. 

“I never....” Mannix trailed off hopelessly.

“You going to, though. That's why you came here from the start, wasn't it?”

Mannix looked like he want to say no so desperately that for a moment he was sure he was going to chicken out altogether. But at the end of it, he let out a shaky breath and nodded. Crawled right up beside him.

He hadn’t really meant for this to happen, but he liked that, getting Chris Mannix to crawl over of his own volition.

Mannix stared at the bulge in Warren's trousers for a moment like it was dangerous, and hell, it was. Then he was unbuttoning Warren's trousers with a madman's desperation, lowered his head as soon as Warren was out of his pants, his mouth closing over him. At first Mannix just held him in his mouth for a long time, like he was getting used to the taste or savoring it, one or the other. Warren had to get his hands in the white boy's hair to get him moving, but when he did Chris Mannix thawed like spring, closed his eyes, gave himself over to it entirely. Warren sighed and pulled on his hair again, coaxed some needy little slurps and licks out of Mannix’s mouth, though it was obvious enough he didn't have a clue what he was doing. At some point he became aware of Mannix humping himself half-wild against his leg, and that, of all things, was what pushed him over the edge. He gathered up Mannix’s hair, pulled him close as he came and Mannix jerked a bit in surprise at what he found in his mouth, but he relaxed after a moment and swallowed it all. He came up off him, bewildered eyes like he hadn’t imagined this would ever happen. Warren was feeling generous enough that he reached for his cock through his pants, but Mannix jerked away like he’d been burned.

I don’t want anything,” he snapped.

"Suit yourself." He felt irritated at being rebuffed, but more irritated that he even offered in the first place, because what did he care if Mannix got off.

But Mannix just wrapped himself in a blanket, wedged himself comically tight up against the edge of the tent, and went to sleep like his hard-on wasn’t pitching a second tent to rival the one they were sleeping in. Fine. Let him deprive himself for his own tortured white boy reasons. Didn't matter to him. Wasn't like any of this would be going on for much longer anyhow. Warren rolled over, turned away from him, and was asleep before he could think one more thought.

 

Fuck if that didn’t start a routine. Mannix going down on his knees, whether they were in a hotel or a boarding house or a tent in the middle of the goddamn woods and sucking him, going to sleep with a hard-on that’d put out someone eye. It’d have been impressive, if it wasn’t so obnoxious. Still. Warren wasn’t about to turn down a free suck.

The last time, Warren looked in his eye. Mannix came up looking lost the way he always did afterward. "Is this what you came out here for?" Warren said, amused, or trying for it. 

"I didn't come out here for any of this," Mannix said.

“Well, it'll be over soon enough.” He didn't feel as glad about that as he meant to.

 

In the end, it took another month. The bandages had come off Warren’s hand and the burn had just about faded away to nothing when they found the Harrow brothers. It was Warren who called the town, but it was Mannix who buttered up the old lady at the general store till she leaned in and told him all about those three brothers had come to town with too much money some weeks back and bought up a little calving operation outside of town, said it had been a lifelong dream, and run it into the ground in no time flat and were now holed up there, doing a whole lot of nothing.

Warren and Mannix sat in a copse of trees, passing binoculars back and forth and confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt it was them. The three brothers were passing a lazy day drinking and using someone's nice china plates as target practice. They looked like about the same sort of dumbass stock as Mannix came from, but there was no denying that even drunk, they hit most of what they aimed at.

“How we gonna do this?”

Warren considered. He figured the three of them’d had time to go stir-crazy, and there was no telling what kind of pent-up violence was in them, having gone without killing these past however many weeks. Sprawling ramshackle house, too, with plenty of room to hide didn’t work to their advantage. Warren considered the matter, then laid out the plan. They’d wait till nightfall, then they’d start a fire in the hay silo. Hidden out in the trees, they’d pick them off one by one when the fire drew them out.

Mannix listened to the plan and whistled, low and steady.

“Major, you’ve got some kind of special knack for this cold-blooded shit,” he said, then grinned, that grin he always got when killing was afoot.

“You sure you ain't going to get squeamish about that when the time comes?”

Mannix shrugged. “Like I said. These three are the ones I wasn't close to.”

Not long after nightfall, Warren snuck out to the silo, left wide open in the Harrow brothers’ haste to drink themselves into an early grave. Well, never let it be said Warren wasn't obliging.

He went back to wait with Mannix, and soon enough, the fire caught and sent flames up to the sky. Voices started shouting.

Three men came stumbling out of the house, pulling on boots as they ran, and a hail of gunfire from Warren and Mannix was all it took to bring them down. It was a pretty pitiful display from men who’d got twenty thousand dollars on their heads for murder, but Warren wasn’t complaining any.

Mannix holstered his gun. “That was easy as blowing out a candle,” he said, though he sounded somber saying it. “Guess it’s the end of the line for the two of us too.”

“Yeah, guess so,” said Warren. It'd be a relief to put this whole chapter behind him.

Mannix walked around the two men who’d made it the furthest, frowning a bit at them, and Warren didn’t know what he had a bug up his ass about, the dead men he’d known once or their partnership ending, but it irritated him either way.

The two of them both stepped up on the porch to claim the third man. Burt Harrow, as Mannix helpfully informed Warren he was, had fallen across the threshold, head still inside, and Mannix was taking him by the shoulders when a bullet slammed into the floor by his foot and he jumped out of the way. A second later, three more shots came. They both dove for cover: Mannix diving behind a stone table inside and Warren outside, back up against the wall, beside the door so he could still see in.

The impact of bullets rattled the ceiling and walls, and the gunslinger, whoever he was, hollered, “What the fuck you bastards do to my brothers?”

Warren was reloading his gun, cursing himself for emptying it on those drunk bastards, for just taking it for granted that they was alone, mentally calculating how long it’d take him to get to Chris and kill whoever this fourth motherfucker was when—

“Tom Harrow, that you?” Chris Mannix said tentatively.

Long pause from the other side of the door. Then Tom Harrow, presumably, called back, in a flat kind of voice, “Chris Mannix?”

“You know it is. Now I _know_ these are unpleasant circumstances we find ourselves meeting under—”

“That what you call _killing my kin_ , Chris?”

Mannix flinched a bit, like he hadn’t ever heard anything laid out so plain. “I liked them, but even you got to admit they was mean bastards with a hell of a bounty on their heads. And my partner and I had a warrant on them... and I didn't think you'd be here,” Mannix said. “But anyway there ain’t no warrant out for you. You can still run.”

“Run, why’d I want to run?”

Warren took that opportunity to step out of the shadow of the door, gun in both hands, with a bead right on Tom Harrow. Harrow boy number four kept his gun trained on Mannix, right between his eyes. Harrow boy's eyes, which already were killing crazy, nearly popped out of his head. “Is that Marquis Warren?”

“You know I am,” Warren said, and he felt the barest trace of pride, or would have, if that jumpy cracker hadn’t had a bead drawn right between Mannix’s eyes.

Harrow stared at Mannix, betrayed all to hell. “You took up with _him_?" he whispered to Mannix. "You know we read in the papers about you two being in that ambush together, last year or whenever the fuck. 'That sure don’t sound like Chris,' we said. Couldn’t of been our Chris. No way in the world our Chris would have got that kill-crazy nigger in the same room with him and not finished the job. This, though,” he waved his free hand between the two of them, “Not in a thousand years would I have—what the fuck _happened_ , Chris?”

Chris looked like a man waking up from a dream. “Tom—I’m still—”

Warren watched him stare between the two like a dog between two owners, and felt a sort of hopelessness settle over him as Mannix's eyes settled Tom. White boy'd been called to heel, and it was stupid of Warren to think he could resist it, not from some white boy friend, not when he was being reminded of folks back home.

No sooner had he thought it than Mannix caught his eye, and launched himself at Tom like he was a coiled spring, a full-body attack, a kind of suicide attack right at Tom, who was ready for him, and shot him. Mannix stumbled, staggered back against the wall.

Tom Harrow spun around for Warren, but he wasn't fast enough for that. No one was. Warren emptied his revolvers and finished off the last of the Harrow brothers.

Without quite knowing how he’d got there, he’d crossed the room and caught Mannix with his free arm, kept him from sliding to the ground.

He’d been shot in the side. At a glance, he’d guess that he wasn’t bleeding as much as he could have been, but all he could see was the gun discharge just a few feet from Mannix. So close. Too close.

Chris grabbed at his hand, and squeezed it. “Fuck. Major. He didn’t get you?”

“He didn’t get me.” Felt something more than fondness, thinking of how he’d launched himself across the room at Tom, launched himself right into a bullet.

Mannix swallowed. “Well, that’s something,” he said, then went into something might have been a swoon. Warren half walked him and half-dragged him across the room, eased him back onto the bed. Mannix came around enough to say, “It _fucking_ hurts.”

He pulled the flap of Mannix’s jacket open, and Mannix hissed like it was his own flesh and blood he was rending. Mannix’s shirt was drenched in blood, and it took a minute of searching before Warren found the bullet hole under the shoulder holster Mannix had been wearing.

“This don’t look so bad.”

Mannix barked out a laugh, then gasped and grabbed his side.

“Not saying it's nothing," He fingered the shoulder holster. “But your holster caught it first. Bullet still went through, but it slowed it way down. It's a shallow wound.”

Rooting around the room, he turned up linens could be torn into strips and whiskey and a needle and thread, got Mannix’s shirt torn open wide enough that he could see what he was doing, exposing pale skin slicked with blood and a round bullet hole, almost neat, not near as ugly as plenty others he’d seen before. The flat bottom of the bullet was just barely visible under all that blood.

“Stop squirming and I can make this fast and easy.”

“That a promise?” Mannix was shivering and alternately staring at the ceiling and throwing guilty glances in the direction of Tom Harrow’s body, which Warren had to concede was understandable, given the circumstances.

“You won’t enjoy it any, but like I said, you won’t die either.”

With a lot of bitching he got Mannix to lie on his side facing him, poured alcohol over the wound, got the blood washed away. Cleared away, he could see the hole, see the angry bruise already forming around it and the red exposed flesh within, something you’d think Mannix had never seen before, given the way he gaped at it. He touched Chris just above all that, where the skin was a faint purple, to get him used to the feeling, so he didn’t get jumpy and fuck things up. It had been a long time since he’d done this, even longer since he’d done this for anyone but himself. His finger touched the entrance of the wound, and he held it there, letting the oozing blood soak the tip of his finger. He applied the faintest trace of pressure, just to see how hard this would be. Chris Mannix moaned deep in the back of his throat.

He felt a twinge of annoyance, thinking that that couldn’t have even hurt all that much even for Mannix, when something twigged for him. Mannix, for his part, had shut his mouth with an audible click, a startled and ashamed look on his face.

With a funny kind of knowing, he pushed his finger in a fraction of an inch, Mannix’s side quivering a bit around him but trying not to. He felt the warmth and the moisture around him, and Mannix watched his finger disappearing inside him, into the path the bullet had torn, looking both amazed and appalled. Warren felt like he could just about feel his pulse pumping up against the calloused pad of his finger, though he knew it wasn’t so. He stole a glance at the front of Mannix’s pants, and felt no surprise at all to see that Mannix was half-stiff.

“Fuck you, major,” Mannix said turning his face away, hard and hopeless. “You have unnatural effects on me in every _possible_ way. I don’t know why I’m even surprised anymore.”

He couldn't help it, he smiled. He slipped his thumb in with his finger, not deep enough to grab the bullet yet, just enough to get him used to being opened up. Mannix winced a bit, but the pain seemed to be outweighed by whatever else he was getting out of that touch.

He said, “That was real nice back there, Chris. You take a bullet real well.”

Mannix’s eyes closed tight. “I guess I’ve gotten my share of practice, since I met you.”

The thought made him kind of warm. “You ain’t their man,” he asked softly. “You’re mine. Been mine since you took that gun out of my holster.”

Mannix let a shaky breath out, jerked out a desperate nod. “And you ain’t even pulled that bullet out as recompense.”

“Suppose you’ve earned that much,” he agreed. “But I’m going to have to dig it out with my fingers. You gonna holler if I do that?”

“No, sir."

Warren handed the booze to Mannix first, let him take several deep swigs of it, drink some color back into his cheeks. He was staring at the hole in his own side with queasy fascination. “I never properly appreciated how lucky I was, being out like a light when that doctor in Red Rock was working on me.”

Warren thought that it probably was a good thing, if Mannix was going to go and get wood from having a man’s fingers up in his bullet wounds. But he didn’t say anything, just worked at moving his thumb a bit further in, let Mannix re-adjust to the sensation. He wasn’t sure when his other hand had ended up on Mannix’s hip, but there it was. He tried not to think too much about it.

Mannix made a noise deep in the back of his throat as Warren prodded the bullet a bit with his fingers, trying to get his fingers around it.

“What’s that feel like?” he asked, genuinely curious.

He grimaced as Warren’s fingers brushed the bullet. “Like you inside me.”

 He hadn’t had much of a chance to appreciate it before, back at Minnie’s—he’d been too busy writhing in his own pain to pay much attention to Mannix’s, but Mannix was pretty like this. Fucked up and wounded suited him.

“No wonder you like it.”

“No wonder.”

That was when Warren finally got the bullet between thumb and finger. Slippery as his fingers were in Mannix’s blood, he kept ahold of it as he pulled it out. Mannix moaned, feeling it go. And then there was nothing, emptiness and cold air and him holding up a bullet in the dim light and the clatter as he dropped it in the bowl beside the bed.

He doused the wound in whiskey again, let Mannix hiss from the sting; got a clean linen pressed up against the opening.

Mannix looked vaguely disappointed, but snatched the bottle back and took another slug, his eyes fixed hard on Warren, like they were trying to read what Warren’s thoughts.

He picked up the needle and thread and stitched him up, and that part went fast, and got the bandages wound on tight, till Mannix was left staring at the clean white strips of linen wrapped around his middle.

He looked at the remaining blood on his fingers. “Never seen anyone like that as much as you do,” he said. "Never seen anyone like that at all."

He still had Mannix’s blood on his fingers, and was about to wipe them on one of the linens when he thought better of it. He brought them up to Mannix’s lips, and Mannix opened his mouth automatically, like that was a normal thing to do. Licked all the blood off without needing to be told.

And fuck if he didn’t choose that time of all times to say, “Major, I need something.” He considered refusing, but not that seriously. Before he'd even finished thinking about it his hand had slipped down Mannix’s pants, fingers working that fly undone practically of their own accord. Maybe Mannix wasn’t the only one felt like he was somehow entranced or bewitched. Mannix futilely hitched his hips up a bit against his palm the second he was in there.

He braced his left hand against Mannix’s shoulder, got his cock in his hand and started to stroke him. Mannix just about lost his mind from that, just from being touched. Warren wasn’t in any kind of hurry, but he supposed he was about as frustrated as any man could be by now, so he brought him off in no time at all.

Mannix wiped himself off and laid back and sighed. “You wouldn’t make any kind of doctor, major.”

“Good thing my talents run in other directions then.”

“They sure do.” He lazily reached for Warren's cock. In the end, Mannix wasn’t much use for anything but getting his hands on Warren and repaying him in kind, but that was just fine. 

Lying in bed afterward, Mannix turned his head slightly. “Think I deserve a bit more of the cut on that bounty?” 

“I suppose maybe you do,” he said. “Though I hope you’re not planning for a payout every time you get shot.”

“Why major, you’re talking like you’re planning to keep me on.”

It seemed pointless to deny, and equally pointless to admit it. "Rest up," he said instead. "I want to get the hell out of here tomorrow."


End file.
